The bell tolls for a satirical outfit the moment it's sponsored by its targets. JibJab.com, the bell tolls for thee.

The quirky production shop that started in the late '90s in a basement or a garage or something now has an alliance with MSNVideo.com, and its latest feature -- a swipe at the media -- premiered last week at the Radio and Television Correspondents' dinner. Later that night, it was on one of those late-night comedy shows.

The other entertainment at the correspondents' dinner featured Karl Rove rapping and dancing for the audience. Video of his spastic performance has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube.

JibJab's video has not, for one simple reason: It's not funny.

In fact, JibJab hasn't put out anything funny since its "This Land" bombshell. Instead, its stuff has been mildly droll and slightly clever but, more than anything, just plain obvious.

The last time you probably heard of JibJab was during the 2004 election, when its rendering of John Kerry and George W. Bush doing a duet of "This Land Is Your Land" was seen by every man, woman and child on Earth 10 times over.

The musical parody, a blend of photographs of the presidential candidates and South Park-like cartoon backgrounds, was genius. It savaged both figures with dead-on impressions while issuing a catchy tune and giving Bill Clinton just the right amount of screen time -- with his hands on a swimsuit-clad beauty, getting slapped by Hillary. I must have watched it a dozen times and laughed so hard I cried.

On JibJab

JibJab's latest work, dubbed "What We Call the News," jumps on the media for, as its own unfunny press release says, "covering absurd and ridiculous stories to the exclusion of hard news in their epic quest for ratings."

That's not an original argument, but it wouldn't necessarily have doomed the musical number if JibJab had found an original angle. It didn't. Instead, viewers get a parade of Britney Spears, Anna Nicole Smith, JonBenet Ramsey, Scott Peterson, Martha Stewart and other tabloid stories the media has covered.

The sharpest humor creatively exposes truths that we'd sometimes rather not see. The problem with JibJab is that it's less the iconoclast asking uncomfortable questions and more the stoned hippie lecturing us on what the real crime is, man. And it's not that we disagree with the righteous hippie. It's that we heard it the last time he was high.

JibJab's year-end summary musicals are equally flat, just a list of stuff that happened in 2005 or 2006 to a rhyming tune. Its anti-Wal-Mart video looks like it was paid for -- and written -- by the service employees' union. In trying to use its medium to make a point, JibJab has in the process dulled its knife.

The other videos put out since "This Land" are equally blah, and when I went back and watched the old Kerry/Bush singalong, I couldn't remember what was so funny about it. (Go back and watch it again. It's still at the top of the Web site.)

The problem might not be JibJab. It might be that the world has just passed it by. When color TV came out, according to legend, the first show featured a fireplace and the nation sat transfixed, watching it glow on their screens.

We don't watch shows about fireplaces anymore; now we're transfixed by sneezing pandas, cats that play the piano and, yes, Karl Rove flailing his arms. The cartoons just aren't doing it anymore. "This Land" was 2004's fireplace, and JibJab is still trying to throw more logs on the fire.

On Friday, the media parody was the middle of three featured clips on MSNVideo.com. The other two: an A&E piece called "Guest Bedroom: Newlyweds Redo Their Guest Room That Was Full of Junk" and something from CNET.com offering to tell you about "Europe's best hotel castle, sugar batteries, clothes that fit …"

To get to the JibJab cartoon, you have to sit through a Snickers ad.

Despite the buzz and its ample exposure, it didn't make the list of the 10 most-watched videos, beaten out by, among others, "Trump Slaps McMahon," "Teletubbies: Who's Behind the Costume?" and "Swimmer Assaulted by Father."